> I'm not happy with what I've seen so far in terms of rendering 3D graphs in
> Python. I want to be able to draw many points in 3D, each with its own
> coordinates and other attributes such as size and color, and render the scene
> with optional dynamic parameters (such as rotating it around some axis).
> 
> But that would mean POV-Ray would have to take a scene file with thousands of
> small objects (the dots), each point being a small opaque sphere. The file will
> be machine-generated and fairly large. Should I be concerned with the
> performance of the renderer?
> 
> The scene will otherwise be simple - I will draw a system of coordinates, and
> optionally grids of coordinates. I'm not planning on using textures.
> 

There are scenes containing several millions of objects that render 
rather quickly. I recently rendered a scene containing over 50 000 000 
cones using high quality radiosity that rendered in about 12 hours. It 
was a fractal from an old IRTC contest where I increased recursion level 
by 3 and added radiosity.

As your objects are simple spheres (one of the faster shape to render), 
opaque, non-reflective, counting only in the thousands and plain 
texturing, POV-Ray should have no problem rendering it.
In the case of large files, simple shapes, parsing time is often 
affected more than render time.

On a modern computer, memory requirement is a non-issue for even 
millions of spheres. Those could even be individually textured with 
almost no effect on the performance.

I would suggest using +bm2 on the command line to use the octree 
partitioning feature. When you have thousands of objects, it usually 
improve the rendering performance.

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